Stiff Little Fingers -Aylesbury Friars 10th Birthday Party 2 June 1979 (Part 4)

On Saturday 2nd June 1979, Friars Aylesbury Music Club celebrated its tenth year of existence with a special gig at the Maxwell Hall. Stiff Little Fingers were headliners, with their third appearance at the venue in the space of nine months. The support acts included Starjets and local hero John Otway.
Some 40 years later, SLF were booked to appear for the 50th anniversary of Friars and as a nostalgic look back at that date in 1979, I was excited to find some rare audio recordings of the evening in my own personal collection.
This is part 4 of a series of audio clips I uploaded before Stiff Little Fingers appeared again at Friars on Saturday 25th May 2019.
The choice of Stiff Little Fingers as headliners for Aylesbury Friars 10th Birthday Party was an entirely apt one for the time. The Irish band had debuted at Friars the previous October as the opening act on The Tom Robinson Band Out of the Darkness tour. They had immediately created an impression on an audience that was receptive to the political situations of the late 1970’s.
The band returned to Friars in February 1979 as headliners on the Rough Trade tour. The intensity of their performance that evening simply blew the relatively young audience away.
Just four months later they would return again as the chosen guests to headline Friars 10th birthday party. For a teenager at the time and still at school, ten years seemed an eternity. A decade previous to that, in the same year that Friars through open its doors, The Beatles were still in existence (just) and the glam rock scene had yet to break the market, let alone the punk explosion of 1976 onwards.
Just to stamp their authority on the occasion, they opened their set on that June 1979 evening with ‘Suspect Device’ followed by ‘Alternative Ulster’ - no saving those for the encores. The mass of youthful faces at the front that evening didn’t know what had hit them.
Seeing the reaction of the audience, lead singer Jake Burns declared to the audience, ‘This is why we love playing Aylesbury’. Even in the early days of their career and with just two previous gigs at the Friars venue behind them, they had started to engrave themselves as legends of the famous Buckinghamshire club.
The set-list that evening was
1. Suspect Device
2. Alternative Ulster
3. Closed Groove
4. No More of That
5. Straw Dogs
6. Break Out
7. State of Emergency
8. Barbed Wire Love
9. Wait and See
10. Here we are Nowhere
11. Law and Order
12. Gotta Gettaway
13. Johnny Was
14. Wasted Life
15. Tiger Feet (encore)
16. 78 RPM (encore)
17. Suspect Device (encore)
Visit the excellent www.aylesburyfriars.co.uk/ website for more on the history of Friars.